In a market economy, there are many reasons why it is important to measure or track the consumption of goods and services. For instance, shampoo producers may want to obtain sales data from supermarket retailers in order to deduce how often people replenish their stock of shampoo in their homes. This information may be useful to the shampoo producers since they can use it to estimate demand during production planning. Monitoring the consumption of goods and services is useful in a variety other settings as well. For instance, television networks measure television usage metrics to determine which shows are being watched by users and which are not.
Unlike tangible goods like shampoo, determining the consumption of digital content, such as digital music, has been difficult. There has been no easy way to measure the consumption of digital content once it has been received by the consumer. In particular, it is uncommon for the same digital content to be repurchased by the same consumer, whereas the same type of shampoo will have a greater likelihood of being repurchased by the same consumer. Further, the fact that digital content is downloaded onto a device does not mean that the user has consumed the downloaded content. For instance, where the downloaded content is music, currently there is no easy way to find out whether the user has actually listened to the downloaded music.
Current systems for tracking digital content usage focus on download statistics. This is unfortunate since the music industry, for example, is a high value market, where promotion and product launch are very high cost exercises. Music is advertised through radio, television and printed media, and success is measured by the number of unit sales. But other than bottom line sales data, there are very few indicators that the music industry can rely on to determine what consumers' likes and dislikes are since there is no easy way to monitor the product consumption.